Newbie Help

old guy looking for MUD?

I'm so sick of the WOW type kiddie MMO stuff...i'm an older player 64 to be exact..i'm looking for something immersive and a total MUd newbie..i'm a two finger typer though and would like to get into a mud that's Newbie friendly...a pay MUD would be fine for me..just remember i'm your basic old gomer with a 25 year old brain

I think you'd like GateWay. I'm no spring chicken myself at 44 and I find it to suit me well. There's no universal PK so no maniacal twitchy 13 year olds running amuck to ruin your day. :-) The mud has a great feature for us 2 finger typists (I'm one myself) called 'nickname' which lets you shorten anything down. Aliases are also well done with a system to let you repeat commands just by putting a number in front (e.g. 10 get sword will get 10 swords). The do command also rocks by letting you string commands together (ideal for putting in an alias).

Lotsa newbie areas with a convenient guide system to bring you to them so you can do stuff without having to explore first.

And you wouldn't be the only older mudder there either. One player I met was 58 and one Wiz is even older.

You may try ArcticMUD and see if you like it. From my (very incomplete) statistics, ~50% of our new players are 25-35 years old (I personally started at 27). Since the game exists since 1992 and many of our players play for a decade or more, a large part of our playerbase must be 40+ now. Not sure about 60+, but who cares? Just join us and have fun!

The setting of the game is Dragonlance fantasy world. To tell the truth, I first started playing Arctic and read the novels only several years later to get the idea of the background. Imagine what - I was disappointed! An OK reading for teens (or even under-teens), but at 30+, it feels primitive. Solving the quests in Arctic is much more interesting.

As to typing, there is nothing to worry about. Arctic is a hack-n-slash DikuMUD and once you set the hotkeys in your client, you need just 1 finger to type F5 to bash, F6 to punch etc. You may talk to other players and do non-trivial quest actions later, when you rest after battle.

Finally, our newbie training area is excellent: the town of Solace was recently re-designed to make it a perfect starting place for a new player. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on our forum, or talk to other players and immortals directly in the game.

We have all ranges of ages on New Worlds Ateraan and it is an increbibly exciting and intense game. You will like it. What you won't find, like almost every other MUD and every MMORPG, is anyone under the age of 18. It is against the rules in our game because we like serious roleplayers. Check it out at www.newworlds-rpg.com.

It's a "furry" game (the characters are animals) set in an Italian-themed Renaissance city.

The playerbase is mostly older teenagers and 20-somethings, although we have a fair number of players >30 - there is the expectation of adult (as in mature rather than sexual) roleplaying, with themes such as slavery, class struggle, politics etc.

The game is focussed on roleplaying more than achievement, which means there aren't any obvious easy ways to make it faster for slow typers. You do have the ability to create "macros" that are expanded into longer sentences (so you could make a macro like "bowall" that will make your character "elegantly bow to all the people in the room" or something similar.)

It is a pay mud, which also gives you access to the other pay muds hosted by Skotos, which are also worth having a look at. The first month is free.

We have had quite a few older players here at The Eternal-City (The Eternal City) which is a MUD based on the Roman era that is hosted by Skotos (the same company that hosts Ironclaw Online). If you enjoy the Roman era and would enjoy mandatory role-playing, The Eternal-City is the perfect place for you. It is newbie friendly and there is even an organization whose goal is to help newcomers to the game both in-character and out-of-character. Furthermore, there is very restricted player killing which needs to be approved by the game staff. It is by far the most immersive MUD I have had the pleasure of playing.

The game is currently free to play after your one month free trial expires, but you also have the ability to purchase a basic account which gives you access to this game (with benefits) and many other games on Skotos.

I hated playing WoW when I got all those little twerps running after me every five seconds wanting to "duel"...sigh...killing them was too easy. That's probably why I play muds. Though, since I don't do PK I don't have to worry about it.

On Dragon's Exodus, the only thing that you really have to worry about is eating. Wait....no...*gets mental image of "YOU ARE HUNGRY."* Veto that thought. You might start gaining weight. Yes.

Pizza hut loves me.

Ok.

Most of the players are older, at least in their late teens to mid-twenties. The Admin staff is a friendly group of people. Except for me. I'm mean. Honest. They tell me that at work.

We are RP - Encouraged. Which basically means RP if you want to. Not Role Playing won't hurt you in any form. My first character never did. Then I got into the groove of interacting with others and re-created with a totally cool character who everyone loved. And then I re-created him that one several times over the last decade.

Darn those evil pixies who type delete yes when I'm getting another can of Dr. Pepper.

There are several classes, one of which, shadow knight can use two-handed weapons at level 40 (out of 250 mortal levels). Races are fun: human, elf, ghoul, *cough* pixie, and gnomes to name just a few. Most of the races have their attributes and racial bonuses. Like gnomes which have an increased fire-based damage output....however they explode when their chemicals interact in bad ways.

There is a newbie-helping guild called "mentors".
A role-playing guild.
Several clans. <Go Ravens!>

I'm so sick of the WOW type kiddie MMO stuff...i'm an older player 64 to be exact..i'm looking for something immersive and a total MUd newbie..i'm a two finger typer though and would like to get into a mud that's Newbie friendly...a pay MUD would be fine for me..just remember i'm your basic old gomer with a 25 year old brain

My company, Frogdice, has been making muds for almost 20 years. First on BBSes, later on the internet. We have two muds that may interest you:

Threshold RPG is hardcore required RP. It has 15 years of real in game history, an extremely deep religion system, enough political wrangling to satisfy anyone, and tons of the standard monster bashing stuff as well (tons of abilities, guilds, races, etc.). There are more mini-games and fully coded activities than I could even begin to list here.

Primordiax takes place in the same world as Threshold, but 4,000 years in the future. It is still a fantasy game world, but a lot has changed. It is not RP required, but it is IC (In Character) required. This is a subtle but significant difference. In addition to much of what you find on Threshold, it also has an extremely deep crafting system. Crafting on Primordiax is as detailed as combat is on other MUDs. It is not just point and click, or type a command and wait. It involves gear, buffs, teamwork (if desired), and strategy.

Primordiax is a text/graphics hybrid with our own flash client. That tends to make things easier for people as well.

Average player age in a mud is a pretty interesting topic, even if it is a bit hard to offer any statistics, since there is no way to determine whether a player is truthful about their age or not.
So even if for instance New Worlds has 18 as minimum requirement, it's not really possible to enforce such a rule.

It's also sometimes hard to determine age by assessing the maturity level of the players, since a 30+ player can act a lot more immaturely than a 10 year old - it's in fact quite common.

I think most muds nowadays have a generally much older playerbase than they did 10 years ago. My own one certainly has. When we first went into business, we had a pretty mature staff, but most of the players were around 15, and we had a couple of 11 year olds that were surprisingly successful. Today the average player age is well over 20, since many of the youngsters stayed on and grew up, and the inflew of new players is a lot less nowadays than it used to be.

I'm not really certain of it, but the impression I get is that even the newbies are generally older nowadays. I really doubt we get any 11 years at all, those go directly to WoW.

Text muds used to be a hobby for high school kids, today it's for old geezers.
Does anyone else have the same experience?

Text muds used to be a hobby for high school kids, today it's for old geezers.
Does anyone else have the same experience?

Definitely. Our playerbase has gotten progressively older as we have, though I run into a lot of college-aged kids when I'm on a graphical MMO-type game. I think those are just a lot easier to find than the muds, but in the past, people who wanted an online community experience would come looking for us. Now they don't even have to make the effort because WoW's on TV telling them to come play.

Text muds used to be a hobby for high school kids, today it's for old geezers.
Does anyone else have the same experience?

When I first started mudding, almost all the players I encountered were University students. These days there seems to be far more diversity in terms of age, but I do still draw in quite a few younger players.

A bigger difference I've noticed is in terms of geographical location. Back when I ran my first mud, almost all of my players connected from UK Universities. With my current mud, around 63% of the players play from the US, with only around 6% from the UK - and I can't recall the last time I encountered a UK student. It makes me wonder where they've all gone...blocked behind firewalls most likely.

Text muds used to be a hobby for high school kids, today it's for old geezers.
Does anyone else have the same experience?

I wish it were true. The most complaints our staff have had this summer is the numerous teens that keep sneaking into the game bypassing our age requirement.

The reason we have the age requirement is to get decent (somewhat non emo) roleplayers and our playerbase likes that. Lately it is kiddie land attack and takes a lot of staff power to control the influx. Perhaps it is due to the proliferation of texting.